Good point - you plug the wireless dongle into the wii...:-) though why nintendo didn't come out with their own keyboard, complete with motion sensor... instead of the cursor keys, just tilt the keyboard. And for those who miss rogue...
Awww, truth hurts? That the flaws in the GPL are what is letting Microsoft charge a toll, and that android should have been built upon BSD instead, like Jobs did with OSX? Tsk, tsk, tsk.
Some people learn by their mistakes, others duck their heads in the sand.
The GPL is so full of holes it's not a joke. For example, you can literally take ANY gpl code, patch it in memory, use it any way you want, and as long as you're not saving the patched code in permanent storage, it's not a derivative work, as per the 9th Circuit (Game Genie - which Nintendo didn't appeal because they knew that the courts interpretation of a "derivative work" would stand on appeal), you do not have to distribute your patches. Forget TIVOization... this is even better.
"Witness that every single film school studies Hitchcock in detail."
[citation needed] - and there are a LOT of film schools, so I doubt you'll be able to back that statement up by showing that every (or even the majority) do. They might want to include it as an example of outdated, stale work, much as the Titanic is included in ship navigation as an example of what NOT to do.
And Shakespeare? Do you really want to compare Tolkien (and Hitchcock) with Shakespeare?
You just lost any credibility you might have had with anyone else following this thread.
The Prior BSD License (1988 - the one before the 4-clause BSD license) predates the GPL.
Copyright (c) <year <copyright holder.
All rights reserved.
Redistribution and use in source and binary forms are permitted
provided that the above copyright notice and this paragraph are
duplicated in all such forms and that any documentation,
advertising materials, and other materials related to such
distribution and use acknowledge that the software was developed
by the <organization. The name of the
University may not be used to endorse or promote products derived
from this software without specific prior written permission.
THIS SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ``AS IS'' AND WITHOUT ANY EXPRESS OR
IMPLIED WARRANTIES, INCLUDING, WITHOUT LIMITATION, THE IMPLIED
WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
Note that even prior to this, BSD was being distributed openly.
Stallman has been making ad hominem attacks on people all his public life. He deserves anything and everything he gets in return. As only one example, he has demonized anyone who writes anything closed, even if they contribute to F/LOSS projects.
The guy is a dirty (literally) smelly (literally) foot-cheese-and-booger-eating (literally) slob who needs to be cast aside. To get back on topic, his flawed license is one of the reasons that Microsoft is able to charge licensing fees. If Linus had used a BSD-style license, the situation would be much different. The GPL is an evolutionary dead end, but it's only in the last year that we're seeing the full implications.
RMS has probably done more damage to the reputation of FOSS in the last year than SCO did in the last decade. Not that he wasn't doing harm before, with his stupid calls to pirate closed-source programs "because they deserve it", his double standard wrt licensing, and his latest series of lies wrt his own android fud. He's irrelevant. Get over it already.
7. They weren't smart enough to pull and Apple and base their products on BSD instead of Linux.
BSD-style licensing means they could have kept the entire source closed, making it MUCH harder for any outsider to demand royalties (not to mention the whole "you don't see people suing over BSD any more" angle).
How many companies would be suing Microsoft if all their code was open to inspection?
It certainly doesn't do any worse than Tolkien. Really, you want to try to make an argument about "inspecting the intellect" over a fairy tale? Come on. And quit dodging the earlier point - that "The Birds" is also crap by current story-telling standards. Boring, cheesy, even laughable. Go try to watch it without laughing, it is SO bad!
I never said SAW was worthy of a Nobel. What I *did* say was that LoTR is crap story-telling by modern standards. And even by the standards of 50 years ago, it was tedious pap.
And anyone with a $150 Wii can do all that on their TV, plus play games (and you can plug a wireless keyboard into it as well). Nobody does, because people use their TV for watching TV, playing dvds and games, and that's about it.
The fact that Canonical is now trying to sell the concept of UbuntuTV should be enough to tell you that it's a dead end.
Keep dodging the point. All it does is make you look silly. The fact is that "The Birds" is no longer considered even moderately frightening. Go and watch at and see how cheesy it is. We've come a long way in the last generation wrt the art of story-telling, and plodding, boring figures like Hitchcock and Tolkien would not have survived in the modern market.
Today, you're expected to involve the reader or viewer, not treat them like they're so brain-dead that they need every step of the journey explained to them.
Have you even LOOKED at "The Birds" lately? My guess is no, because it is SO cheesy that even kids will laugh at it. Saw, on the other hand, I wouldn't show them because, unlike "The Birds", it doesn't bore you to death.
I'm using the same approach doctors now use, so if you're going to criticize, go for it.
It takes a lot more patience to keep the lines of communications open than it does to say "hey, you keep not treating this and you'll kill yourself." She already knows that. The last thing she needs is someone else dumping on her. That just makes people MORE, not less, likely to listen, or to ask for help.
At least this way we talk about it, and I've been able to give her a bit of advice on how to deal with the cramps in the lower extremities caused by poor blood circulation.
Nobody needs someone coming off with a "holier than thou" attitude, not for this, and not for anything else in life, so I put away the lectures, and I LISTEN. Once in a while, the opportunity presents itself to talk about maybe trying to do something about it.
That's not a quitter attitude on my part. That's "doing what it takes - including "shutting my mouth when I have to" simply because it's more likely to lead to a chance to effect a change.
At the same time, I also keep in mind that ultimately it *IS* her decision. It's not the decision you or I made, but that doesn't mean that you or I get to say how someone else should lead their life, not for ANY medical decision. Respecting someone's basic rights includes respecting their right to control their own body. That applies to treating or not treating their diabetes just as much as it applies to the pill or abortion.
Considering the topic is literature, your spelling says it all.
And the original SAW! is much more of a thriller than anything from Hitchcock. But go show "The Birds" to some kids and see if they don't end up laughing at it - if they don't fall asleep from boredom.
You might want to tell your sister with Type 1 goodbye, as she is significantly reducing her life span and her quality of life that she has left by letting her glucose levels run rampant like that.
I tried that, and it's not a constructive way to deal with the situation. So instead I do what I can to say that I understand - because I do. Insulin-provoked lows are nasty, and if not treated immediately, they have been shown to cause long-term brain damage. They can happen at the most inopportune times, they can be extremely embarrassing depending on the circumstances, they can even result in you losing your job because you're simply not capable of doing it if a low blood sugar shock is going to endanger others.
And nobody likes to wake up in the middle of the night having soaked through the sheets from an insulin-provoked low, feeling like you've been worked over by the local street gang, and having to find enough energy to drag their sorry a** to the kitchen to scoff some carbs, then having to change the sheets, or if you're really zonked, just throw towels on them and crash.
And the finger stabs for the blood samples - sure, we need a LOT less nowadays in terms of the quantity of blood, but that doesn't change the fact that jabbing yourself in the fingers 4-5 times a day is painful - more painful than the actual injections.
Everyone I've talked to who has stopped treatment has named those two - the lows and the finger stabs - as the main reasons. Sure, we can stick ourselves elsewhere to draw blood, but it *still* hurts. And there's really no fix for when you over-exert and your blood sugar drops like a stone, or for when you have to increase the dose because of an infection, and you miscalculate, or for whatever random reason, the same dose has a much greater effect than normal.
So I "get it" why people discontinue treatment. For a lot of people, avoiding pain now is worth more right now today than any hypothetical future problems. After all, "they might get hit by a car and all that pain and hassle ended up being for nothing." So all I can do is listen, tell them I know exactly how they feel, and try to quietly encourage them to reconsider - anything else is just going to be seen as talking down to them.
Ive had plenty of people think that after I tell them I'm a Diabetic they think that I cant have sugar, like its a poison of some type.
I've run into people who refuse to believe that I can eat anything and everything that anyone else can, even after explaining the difference. They "know better". Sure, they didn't sit through courses with nutritionists, they didn't get coaching from a team of doctors, but they "know". And the meddling "know-it-alls" are dangerous, because they're the ones who will try to keep someone from getting their blood sugar levels back up to normal with the "oh they can't have anything sweet" don't-wanna-stupidity. But because type one are such a small percentage of cases, it's an uphill battle.
For what? Recognizing crap when I see it? Not having Aspergers so that I don't feel compelled to finish reading a book when the first 50 pages are utterly devoid of both inspiration and interest? Of having my literary tastes being validated by the Nobel committee?
Or of being a far superior troll than any Tolkien ever came up with?
(hey, it's Troll Tuesday, right, and what better way to troll than by telling the truth - that Tolkien wrote a turd and called it a day.:-)
Irrelevant. Type 1 diabetes is an auto-immune disease that results in the destruction of the insulin-producing cells of the pancreas - not like the vastly more common Type 2, that is related to the body's inability to use the insulin it produces effectively, and can in many cases be treated by losing weight.
Here's a clue - one of my sisters (also type 1) weights less than 90 pounds, and is totally out of control. Do you really believe she has some excess fat stored somewhere that is contributing to it?
I made the mistake of trying to watch a re-run of "The Birds." It's true - you can never go back. Go watch it and tell me you didn't have to stifle a laugh... before turning it off because it's boring.
Oracle has asked people to use the open-source version of Java, because the version they're putting out is only a reference implementation, and will not be updated in a timely manner.
MEMO:
To: Mark Shuttleworth
Canonical
Mark:
Nobody cares what you think any more. We've seen how you treat people in the discussion forums, refusing to answer legitimate questions; how you keep announcing products like the "Android Execution Environment" and then fail to deliver years later, how you flitter from one industry buzz-word to the next without actually developing anything in-house (rebadged cloud, rebadged music store, etc), and how you abandon existing users to chase your "latest greatest hope" in trying to make turn your failed marketing play into something that can be bought out.
Your latest "offering" - UbuntuTV - is a joke thrown together over the last couple of months using other people's code. No manufacturer will make a deal with you for this crap to save your investment. They can just go to the source - the original developers. Any distro can do what you did - root an existing linux TV and install whatever they want. There's a reason they don't.
Your failure to produce even ONE oem tablet deal almost 2 years after they were announced, and a year after they were supposed to be available shows that you need to resign. Now. Pack it in. You're an embarrassment. It's hard to tell who does more damage any more - you or Stallman.
Signed: The 99% of linux users who are fed up with your stupidity.
Please! Get real! Tolkein's "vision" has had almost no impact on our culture
Led Zeppelin IV? From that LP, everything else derives.
Do you really believe that our entire culture is based on a CD that I picked up for $5? Really?
It's why you'll find it in remainder bins for $5 for the three volume set
That's also why I find the Bible or the Illiad at used bookstores for $5. Because they suck!
The bible really does suck. Having slogged through it over 20 times, cover to cover, so as to be able to refute the brainwashed masses, I can tell you that it needs a really good editor to cut out the boring parts, the redundant parts, and the parts that are just too "deus ex machina" (pun absolutely intended).
Trolls, etc., existed outside of Tolkien
You were posting on slashdot before LOTR came out?
The movie? Of course. But as for trolls, etc, in general, just look at Rumpelstiltskin, written exactly 200 years ago this year, LONG before Tolkien was even a gleam in his parents' eyes.
It's not a question of a shorter attention span. People still produce 500-800 page books, and readers still gobble them up. However, what HAS changed is that more people are not just literate, but we also have a much richer set of memes to draw upon, so we don't have to waste nearly as much time setting the stage for our characters to play out on.
Rather, we throw the reader right into the middle, with a good hook and a "sink or swim" attitude. Instead of taking pages to establish that the story is about the life of a woman set in a dystopian future, or a detective investigating a bizarre series of murders, we throw the reader into it with the opening line. No explanations. Just do it. Engage the readers' imagination by letting THEM fill in some of the blanks.
Past writers were simply too timid to try such an approach. Worse, if they had, they would have mostly failed, because the long expositions were a crutch for covering up a lack of pacing. "I'll describe all the minute details of the journey, because that will add verisimilitude" - and yet the journey itself was rather pointless, and would have been excised by any editor today as an attempt to pad the word count. Tolkien was of the "travel guide" school of writing, same as most of his peers. Today it would only rate a much-cut-down graphic novel at best.
The failure to appreciate Professor Tolkien's prose is, in this case, with the reader. Not really surprising on/.
Really? In that case, I'm in great company, since the Nobel team agrees with me.
However, you'll note that even plenty of people who are Tolkien fans agree that his writing is at times VERY tedious.
to turn your argument on its' head, I'm not surprised to find that there are Tolkien fans on slashdot - you almost HAVE to have Aspergers to slog through all that crap.
I've never once taken offense or gotten frustrated when people unknowingly refer to Type 2 diabetes as "Diabetes".
You should - even doctors have gone back to using the old terms "Juvenile-Onset Diabetes" and "Adult-Onset Diabetes" specifically because there are too many retards out there who use the fact that JD (Juvenile Diabetes) cannot be "cured" by dietary changes to avoid dealing with changing their own diet.
I know I've had my fill of people who try to lecture me about how because I have JD that I shouldn't be eating $INSERT_WHAT_I'M_EATING_AT_THE_TIME, even though it's obvious I am not fat, and the docs have said I can eat anything I want as long as I keep my blood sugar within normal levels.
Heck, it's hard enough getting people with JD to treat themselves properly, like one of my sisters. Target blood sugar levels are 4.0 to 7.0 (metric - 70 to 125 for USians). Her? Yesterday at lunch, it was 26 (468) and usually hits 35 (630) by the end of the day. "If I'm going to die of something anyway..." Mine? 4.1 (73).
Her real reasons for not trying to control it? Same as everyone - the finger stabbing 3-4 times a day is worse than the 3-4 times a day needles, and the insulin reactions from trying to exercise the tightest control possible are hell, as is the "hangover" from a really bad reaction (below 2.2 or so). Only masochists would actually like dealing with it.
And then there's a sister with adult onset - won't do anything about her life-long addictions to (non-diet) Pepsi and cigarettes. Looks "like hell" (not my words).
Of course, it just goes to show the perverse nature of the "luck of the draw" that even though I'm the one who has taken the measures necessary to control the disease, I'm also the one who's got the proliferative retinopathy. At least nowadays we know that it's not just caused by poor blood sugar control, so there are fewer people being dumb-asses and assuming somehow it's my own fault.
Wordsworth wrote about the early-19th Century's reading audience and its need for "gross violent stimuli" - or its inability to appreciate subtlety, depth of thought and meditation on experience.
I always think about this when I hear people's complaints about Tolkien's plot "not going anywhere."
Oh, come off it! That's the literary equivalent of saying that we should stick to the way Alfred Hitchcock made his horror movies, which might have been exciting at the time, but are so STIFF and BORING in comparison to even bargain-basement movies like SAW (which would probably have given audiences back then a collective massive coronary). Go watch "The Birds" and try not to laugh at how silly it appears nowadays, and how poor both the actual plot and the directing are.
We know how to tell stories better today - how to quickly immerse people into the character, the setting, and the plot, with subtle cues rather than beating them over the head with every detail, letting the reader (or viewer in the case of movies) be involved and drawn into the story by filling in the blanks themselves.
Consider that Tolkein's vision of dwarves, elves, halflings, orcs, humans, and their relations have had immense impact on our cultural view of what they're supposed to be like.
Please! Get real! Tolkein's "vision" has had almost no impact on our culture. Most people haven't read it, and don't want to read it, because it's frigging BORING! Not just the subject matter, but the writing style.
A huge swath of nerd-dom has been heavily influenced by it
Not really. Trolls, etc., existed outside of Tolkien - it's not like he invented the concept, any more than he invented the leprechaun.
I would argue that people nearly a century later considering your work valuable
Then we can agree that its value is fast approaching zero, because the next generation wants nothing to do with reading it - because it is POORLY WRITTEN. It's why you'll find it in remainder bins for $5 for the three volume set. (I actually picked it up for $2 for the 3, and after wasting my time trying several times to slog through the first volume, consider it way over-priced).
The only practical use for it might be as a screening test for Aspergers.
That Tolkein's writing was boring pap not even worthy of the penny-a-word pulps is news? Hardly.
Tolkein is, at best, the literary equivalent of Powerpoint - both make you stupid.
We've made a lot of advances in how to tell a story in the last 50 years, but even 50 years ago, Tolkein was not great writing. It was not even "good" writing. "Dreadful" would be more like it, unless you think "bore the reader to death in the first 50 pages, and once they're a mindless zombie, they'll read the rest on autopilot" is the makings of good literature.
Anyone who mis-remembers it should go back and read the first few pages, and ask themselves - "Would I read the rest of this based on what I've just read?" If the answer is "yes", you might also want to check out the works of T. S. Geissel.
Slashdot Mirror
Good point - you plug the wireless dongle into the wii ... :-) though why nintendo didn't come out with their own keyboard, complete with motion sensor ... instead of the cursor keys, just tilt the keyboard. And for those who miss rogue ...
Some people learn by their mistakes, others duck their heads in the sand.
The GPL is so full of holes it's not a joke. For example, you can literally take ANY gpl code, patch it in memory, use it any way you want, and as long as you're not saving the patched code in permanent storage, it's not a derivative work, as per the 9th Circuit (Game Genie - which Nintendo didn't appeal because they knew that the courts interpretation of a "derivative work" would stand on appeal), you do not have to distribute your patches. Forget TIVOization ... this is even better.
[citation needed] - and there are a LOT of film schools, so I doubt you'll be able to back that statement up by showing that every (or even the majority) do. They might want to include it as an example of outdated, stale work, much as the Titanic is included in ship navigation as an example of what NOT to do.
And Shakespeare? Do you really want to compare Tolkien (and Hitchcock) with Shakespeare?
You just lost any credibility you might have had with anyone else following this thread.
Absolutely 100% FALSE.
The Prior BSD License (1988 - the one before the 4-clause BSD license) predates the GPL.
Note that even prior to this, BSD was being distributed openly.
The guy is a dirty (literally) smelly (literally) foot-cheese-and-booger-eating (literally) slob who needs to be cast aside. To get back on topic, his flawed license is one of the reasons that Microsoft is able to charge licensing fees. If Linus had used a BSD-style license, the situation would be much different. The GPL is an evolutionary dead end, but it's only in the last year that we're seeing the full implications.
RMS has probably done more damage to the reputation of FOSS in the last year than SCO did in the last decade. Not that he wasn't doing harm before, with his stupid calls to pirate closed-source programs "because they deserve it", his double standard wrt licensing, and his latest series of lies wrt his own android fud. He's irrelevant. Get over it already.
7. They weren't smart enough to pull and Apple and base their products on BSD instead of Linux.
BSD-style licensing means they could have kept the entire source closed, making it MUCH harder for any outsider to demand royalties (not to mention the whole "you don't see people suing over BSD any more" angle).
How many companies would be suing Microsoft if all their code was open to inspection?
I never said SAW was worthy of a Nobel. What I *did* say was that LoTR is crap story-telling by modern standards. And even by the standards of 50 years ago, it was tedious pap.
The fact that Canonical is now trying to sell the concept of UbuntuTV should be enough to tell you that it's a dead end.
Today, you're expected to involve the reader or viewer, not treat them like they're so brain-dead that they need every step of the journey explained to them.
Have you even LOOKED at "The Birds" lately? My guess is no, because it is SO cheesy that even kids will laugh at it. Saw, on the other hand, I wouldn't show them because, unlike "The Birds", it doesn't bore you to death.
I'm using the same approach doctors now use, so if you're going to criticize, go for it.
It takes a lot more patience to keep the lines of communications open than it does to say "hey, you keep not treating this and you'll kill yourself." She already knows that. The last thing she needs is someone else dumping on her. That just makes people MORE, not less, likely to listen, or to ask for help.
At least this way we talk about it, and I've been able to give her a bit of advice on how to deal with the cramps in the lower extremities caused by poor blood circulation.
Nobody needs someone coming off with a "holier than thou" attitude, not for this, and not for anything else in life, so I put away the lectures, and I LISTEN. Once in a while, the opportunity presents itself to talk about maybe trying to do something about it.
That's not a quitter attitude on my part. That's "doing what it takes - including "shutting my mouth when I have to" simply because it's more likely to lead to a chance to effect a change.
At the same time, I also keep in mind that ultimately it *IS* her decision. It's not the decision you or I made, but that doesn't mean that you or I get to say how someone else should lead their life, not for ANY medical decision. Respecting someone's basic rights includes respecting their right to control their own body. That applies to treating or not treating their diabetes just as much as it applies to the pill or abortion.
Considering the topic is literature, your spelling says it all.
And the original SAW! is much more of a thriller than anything from Hitchcock. But go show "The Birds" to some kids and see if they don't end up laughing at it - if they don't fall asleep from boredom.
I tried that, and it's not a constructive way to deal with the situation. So instead I do what I can to say that I understand - because I do. Insulin-provoked lows are nasty, and if not treated immediately, they have been shown to cause long-term brain damage. They can happen at the most inopportune times, they can be extremely embarrassing depending on the circumstances, they can even result in you losing your job because you're simply not capable of doing it if a low blood sugar shock is going to endanger others.
And nobody likes to wake up in the middle of the night having soaked through the sheets from an insulin-provoked low, feeling like you've been worked over by the local street gang, and having to find enough energy to drag their sorry a** to the kitchen to scoff some carbs, then having to change the sheets, or if you're really zonked, just throw towels on them and crash.
And the finger stabs for the blood samples - sure, we need a LOT less nowadays in terms of the quantity of blood, but that doesn't change the fact that jabbing yourself in the fingers 4-5 times a day is painful - more painful than the actual injections.
Everyone I've talked to who has stopped treatment has named those two - the lows and the finger stabs - as the main reasons. Sure, we can stick ourselves elsewhere to draw blood, but it *still* hurts. And there's really no fix for when you over-exert and your blood sugar drops like a stone, or for when you have to increase the dose because of an infection, and you miscalculate, or for whatever random reason, the same dose has a much greater effect than normal.
So I "get it" why people discontinue treatment. For a lot of people, avoiding pain now is worth more right now today than any hypothetical future problems. After all, "they might get hit by a car and all that pain and hassle ended up being for nothing." So all I can do is listen, tell them I know exactly how they feel, and try to quietly encourage them to reconsider - anything else is just going to be seen as talking down to them.
I've run into people who refuse to believe that I can eat anything and everything that anyone else can, even after explaining the difference. They "know better". Sure, they didn't sit through courses with nutritionists, they didn't get coaching from a team of doctors, but they "know". And the meddling "know-it-alls" are dangerous, because they're the ones who will try to keep someone from getting their blood sugar levels back up to normal with the "oh they can't have anything sweet" don't-wanna-stupidity. But because type one are such a small percentage of cases, it's an uphill battle.
Or of being a far superior troll than any Tolkien ever came up with?
(hey, it's Troll Tuesday, right, and what better way to troll than by telling the truth - that Tolkien wrote a turd and called it a day. :-)
Here's a clue - one of my sisters (also type 1) weights less than 90 pounds, and is totally out of control. Do you really believe she has some excess fat stored somewhere that is contributing to it?
I made the mistake of trying to watch a re-run of "The Birds." It's true - you can never go back. Go watch it and tell me you didn't have to stifle a laugh ... before turning it off because it's boring.
Oracle has asked people to use the open-source version of Java, because the version they're putting out is only a reference implementation, and will not be updated in a timely manner.
MEMO:
To: Mark Shuttleworth
Canonical
Mark:
Nobody cares what you think any more. We've seen how you treat people in the discussion forums, refusing to answer legitimate questions; how you keep announcing products like the "Android Execution Environment" and then fail to deliver years later, how you flitter from one industry buzz-word to the next without actually developing anything in-house (rebadged cloud, rebadged music store, etc), and how you abandon existing users to chase your "latest greatest hope" in trying to make turn your failed marketing play into something that can be bought out.
Your latest "offering" - UbuntuTV - is a joke thrown together over the last couple of months using other people's code. No manufacturer will make a deal with you for this crap to save your investment. They can just go to the source - the original developers. Any distro can do what you did - root an existing linux TV and install whatever they want. There's a reason they don't.
Your failure to produce even ONE oem tablet deal almost 2 years after they were announced, and a year after they were supposed to be available shows that you need to resign. Now. Pack it in. You're an embarrassment. It's hard to tell who does more damage any more - you or Stallman.
Signed: The 99% of linux users who are fed up with your stupidity.
Do you really believe that our entire culture is based on a CD that I picked up for $5? Really?
The bible really does suck. Having slogged through it over 20 times, cover to cover, so as to be able to refute the brainwashed masses, I can tell you that it needs a really good editor to cut out the boring parts, the redundant parts, and the parts that are just too "deus ex machina" (pun absolutely intended).
The movie? Of course. But as for trolls, etc, in general, just look at Rumpelstiltskin, written exactly 200 years ago this year, LONG before Tolkien was even a gleam in his parents' eyes.
Rather, we throw the reader right into the middle, with a good hook and a "sink or swim" attitude. Instead of taking pages to establish that the story is about the life of a woman set in a dystopian future, or a detective investigating a bizarre series of murders, we throw the reader into it with the opening line. No explanations. Just do it. Engage the readers' imagination by letting THEM fill in some of the blanks.
Past writers were simply too timid to try such an approach. Worse, if they had, they would have mostly failed, because the long expositions were a crutch for covering up a lack of pacing. "I'll describe all the minute details of the journey, because that will add verisimilitude" - and yet the journey itself was rather pointless, and would have been excised by any editor today as an attempt to pad the word count. Tolkien was of the "travel guide" school of writing, same as most of his peers. Today it would only rate a much-cut-down graphic novel at best.
Really? In that case, I'm in great company, since the Nobel team agrees with me.
However, you'll note that even plenty of people who are Tolkien fans agree that his writing is at times VERY tedious.
to turn your argument on its' head, I'm not surprised to find that there are Tolkien fans on slashdot - you almost HAVE to have Aspergers to slog through all that crap.
You should - even doctors have gone back to using the old terms "Juvenile-Onset Diabetes" and "Adult-Onset Diabetes" specifically because there are too many retards out there who use the fact that JD (Juvenile Diabetes) cannot be "cured" by dietary changes to avoid dealing with changing their own diet.
I know I've had my fill of people who try to lecture me about how because I have JD that I shouldn't be eating $INSERT_WHAT_I'M_EATING_AT_THE_TIME, even though it's obvious I am not fat, and the docs have said I can eat anything I want as long as I keep my blood sugar within normal levels.
Heck, it's hard enough getting people with JD to treat themselves properly, like one of my sisters. Target blood sugar levels are 4.0 to 7.0 (metric - 70 to 125 for USians). Her? Yesterday at lunch, it was 26 (468) and usually hits 35 (630) by the end of the day. "If I'm going to die of something anyway ..." Mine? 4.1 (73).
Her real reasons for not trying to control it? Same as everyone - the finger stabbing 3-4 times a day is worse than the 3-4 times a day needles, and the insulin reactions from trying to exercise the tightest control possible are hell, as is the "hangover" from a really bad reaction (below 2.2 or so). Only masochists would actually like dealing with it.
And then there's a sister with adult onset - won't do anything about her life-long addictions to (non-diet) Pepsi and cigarettes. Looks "like hell" (not my words).
Of course, it just goes to show the perverse nature of the "luck of the draw" that even though I'm the one who has taken the measures necessary to control the disease, I'm also the one who's got the proliferative retinopathy. At least nowadays we know that it's not just caused by poor blood sugar control, so there are fewer people being dumb-asses and assuming somehow it's my own fault.
Oh, come off it! That's the literary equivalent of saying that we should stick to the way Alfred Hitchcock made his horror movies, which might have been exciting at the time, but are so STIFF and BORING in comparison to even bargain-basement movies like SAW (which would probably have given audiences back then a collective massive coronary). Go watch "The Birds" and try not to laugh at how silly it appears nowadays, and how poor both the actual plot and the directing are.
We know how to tell stories better today - how to quickly immerse people into the character, the setting, and the plot, with subtle cues rather than beating them over the head with every detail, letting the reader (or viewer in the case of movies) be involved and drawn into the story by filling in the blanks themselves.
Please! Get real! Tolkein's "vision" has had almost no impact on our culture. Most people haven't read it, and don't want to read it, because it's frigging BORING! Not just the subject matter, but the writing style.
Not really. Trolls, etc., existed outside of Tolkien - it's not like he invented the concept, any more than he invented the leprechaun.
Then we can agree that its value is fast approaching zero, because the next generation wants nothing to do with reading it - because it is POORLY WRITTEN. It's why you'll find it in remainder bins for $5 for the three volume set. (I actually picked it up for $2 for the 3, and after wasting my time trying several times to slog through the first volume, consider it way over-priced).
The only practical use for it might be as a screening test for Aspergers.
That Tolkein's writing was boring pap not even worthy of the penny-a-word pulps is news? Hardly.
Tolkein is, at best, the literary equivalent of Powerpoint - both make you stupid.
We've made a lot of advances in how to tell a story in the last 50 years, but even 50 years ago, Tolkein was not great writing. It was not even "good" writing. "Dreadful" would be more like it, unless you think "bore the reader to death in the first 50 pages, and once they're a mindless zombie, they'll read the rest on autopilot" is the makings of good literature.
Anyone who mis-remembers it should go back and read the first few pages, and ask themselves - "Would I read the rest of this based on what I've just read?" If the answer is "yes", you might also want to check out the works of T. S. Geissel.